President Trump’s surprise announcement that he was pulling the U.S. military out of Syria came with no plan in place for what to do about more than 790 imprisoned ISIS fighters and their families.

Now his administration is in a frantic search for solutions, including a renewed look at sending the most dangerous fighters to Guantanamo Bay, U.S. and congressional officials tell NBC News.

The scramble has been complicated by the fact that the timeline for the planned U.S. withdrawal keeps evolving, with Trump and his aides giving shifting descriptions of how fast the troops are leaving. The ISIS detainees are being held in Syria by U.S.-backed Kurdish forces, who have warned they may have to let the ISIS fighters go if a feared onslaught by Turkish forces occurs.

Amid the tumult, U.S. diplomats and military officials have
been making urgent appeals to foreign countries to take back foreign fighters
who went to fight in Syria and were apprehended, so they can be imprisoned and
prosecuted in their home countries. It’s an appeal the U.S. has been making for
several years in anticipation of an eventual U.S. withdrawal, but nearly every
country has refused.

Now the U.S. warning to embassies is more desperate: Trump’s
decision is real, the U.S. is leaving Syria, and the issue must be resolved
quickly to ensure ISIS fighters aren’t released and rejoin the battle. It comes
amid a frenzied effort to turn the president’s abrupt decision into workable
policy, a period that one former U.S. official described as
“chaotic,” as officials “search for guidance” from the
White House that is not forthcoming.

The White House’s National Security Council declined to
comment.

The basic understanding of Trump’s intentions keeps
changing, from a decision to withdraw all troops within a month to a slower
withdrawal over four months and now, an exit with no specified timeline. After
broad bipartisan concern about a hasty withdrawal, the administration now says
some troops could remain in Syria for an indefinite amount of time.

“There are objectives that we want to accomplish that
condition the withdrawal,” national security adviser John Bolton said
Sunday during a trip to Israel.

Amid the shifting policy, the White House has given national
security officials no written guidance on how to proceed, several officials
said. At a meeting last week with the State Department coordinator for
counterterrorism, Nathan Sales, there were no firm answers about what the
administration wants to do, officials familiar with the meeting said. The State
Department had no comment on the meeting.

Absent any clear instructions, officials are discussing
options based on what they presume Trump and Bolton want to hear, one official
said. The National Counter Terrorism Center, part of the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence, is involved in the planning along with the State
Department and the Pentagon.

To tackle the problem, the U.S. has separated the list of
detainees into three categories: most dangerous, mid-level fighters and some
leaders, and the more general fighters, according to three U.S. officials
familiar with the planning. The most dangerous fighters are the ones under consideration
to send to the detention facility at Guantanamo, which the president has
repeatedly threatened to “load up” with “some bad dudes.”

Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University, says there is precedent for quickly and secretly moving prisoners into Guantanamo Bay.

“Recall what happened in 2001,” she said,
“the U.S. set up Guantanamo in 96 hours. It could happen very fast.”

Greenberg, author of The Least Worst Place, a book about the detention
facility at Guantanamo Bay, reminds that the first planeload of detainees
arrived in Cuba almost exactly 17 years ago, on January 11, 2002. The current
discussions without much actual policy guidance from the White House is
reminiscent of the 2001 scramble to find a place to detain nearly 800 fighters.

But unlike in Afghanistan, where the U.S. military collected
evidence against al-Qaida fighters as they picked them up on the battlefield,
the ISIS fighters in Syria are not in U.S. custody, making it harder to build
cases against them that would hold up in the U.S. or other legal systems.

“These detainees were not apprehended by the United
States and have no connection to the United States,” said Ambassador Lee
Wolosky, the former U.S. special envoy for closing Guantanamo in the Obama
administration. “They should be returned to their countries of origin for
prosecution and incarceration.”

The ISIS fighters are being held in makeshift facilities run
by the Syrian Democratic Forces, a mostly Kurdish coalition of fighters that
the U.S. has relied heavily on for years to fight ISIS on the front lines.
Fearing a post-withdrawal onslaught by Turkey, which considers the Kurdish
fighters to be terrorists, Kurdish officials have threatened that they might
have to simply release the ISIS fighters so they can focus on
self-preservation.

Despite that threat, U.S. officials said it’s considered
unlikely that the Kurdish forces would let the ISIS fighters free – unless
Turkey invades to attack them. Turkey considers the U.S.-backed Kurdish forces
to be an offshoot of the PKK, a Kurdish group deemed by the U.S. to be
terrorists who have waged a two-decade insurgency against Turkey’s government.

If Turkey does attack, as has been widely feared in the wake
of Trump’s decision, the Kurdish forces in Syria would have to redirect all
their resources to defending their territory and could release the ISIS
prisoners, officials said.

That concern may be one reason that Trump’s team is putting
a renewed emphasis on trying to prevent Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
from – as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo put it last week – “slaughtering
the Kurds.”

Ahead of a visit to Ankara, Bolton said an agreement from
Turkey not to attack Syrian Kurdish forces was now a prerequisite to a U.S.
withdrawal. Erdogan has long sought a U.S. exit from Syria and had offered to
Trump that his military would take over and finish off the remaining ISIS
fighters operating in Syria, NBC News has reported.

Two of the detainees held in Syria, El Shafee Elsheikh and
Alexanda Kotey, are suspected of having taken part in the torture and murder of
American and other Western hostages. They were captured one year ago and have
been dubbed “the Beatles” because of their British accents.

The Trump administration, at the urging of some Republican
lawmakers, has considered transferring them to the Guantanamo detention camp.
But Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire has appealed to the
administration to try them in federal courts, arguing that flawed military
commissions for Guantanamo inmates have provided fodder for extremist
propaganda. Shaheen has worked closely with the parents of James Foley, the
American journalist who was murdered by Islamic State in 2014.

The president’s “hasty decision to withdraw American
forces from Syria betrays the trust that Syrian Democratic Forces have put in
the U.S., and risks unraveling our efforts to bring these terrorists to
justice,” Shaheen told NBC News in an email.

Another major dilemma facing the administration: more than
2,000 family members of ISIS fighters who also must be dealt with. The wives
and children are not in prison but in separate sections of camps in Syria for
internally displaced people, officials said.

A few countries, including France and Belgium, have started
talking about taking back some of the families who originated from their
countries, but the problem is far from solved.

Human rights groups have insisted the issue must be solved
before the U.S. forces come out, arguing that local Kurdish authorities are not
equipped to keep holding them or put them on trial. But Human Rights Watch also
emphasized that detainees should not be transferred to countries known to
practice torture or for tainted court trials, including neighboring Iraq, where
the group said the U.S. has already sent at least five of the detainees.

“The issue of the foreign detainees – men, women and
children – should be a key priority for any planning for U.S. withdrawal from
northern Syria, said Nadim Houry, who runs the group’s terrorism and
counterterrorism program. “The local authorities in northern Syria should
not be left to deal with this international issue on their own.”

In the meantime, Guatemala said it was withdrawing from a
United Nations-backed anti-corruption commission and giving its prosecutors a
day to leave the country, as President Jimmy Morales moved to expel a body that
has investigated him, his family and top government officials.

Accusing the commission of overreach and violating
Guatemala’s sovereignty, Foreign Minister Sandra Jovel on Monday announced the
decision after meeting with Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.

An hour later in Guatemala City, Morales held a news
conference accompanied by his ministers in which he accused the U.N. and
Guterres of being silent in the face of what he said were human rights abuses
committed by the commission, known as CICIG for its Spanish initials.

“In spite of Guatemala’s efforts with the United
Nations, the silence, passivity and negativism of the secretary-general
contributed to an uncertainty in the CICIG’s actions that put at risk the
country’s sovereignty,” Guatemala’s president said.

Morales was accompanied by members of a Russian family who
had been convicted of corruption for the use of false documents to open
businesses and buy property in Guatemala, in a case in which the CICIG
participated.

“Thank you, Mr. President, for your fight for
sovereignty and human rights,” said family member Irina Bitkova.

Guterres’ spokesman Stephane Dujarric issued a statement
saying the U.N. expects Guatemala to keep up its end of an agreement that
created the commission, until its mandate ends in September.

Guterres “strongly rejects” Guatemala’s complaints
in withdrawing from the commission, Dujarric said, adding that the group has
made an “important contribution … to the fight against impunity in
Guatemala.”

Jovel accused the commission and its members of politicizing
its work, violating Guatemala’s sovereignty, failing to respect the presumption
of innocence and causing “division in our society.”

“The CICIG has exceeded its authority,” she said.
Jovel said the commission’s staffers have 24 hours to leave the country, though
a Guatemalan court has ruled that the country has to grant them visas.

U.S. Representative Norma Torres, a Democrat from California
who was born in Guatemala, said Morales’ presidency “has set the country
back years, if not decades.”

“When he took office in 2016, Morales had a historic
opportunity to give Guatemalans the transparent and effective government that
they deserve,” she said in a statement. “Instead, when faced with the
prospect of criminal investigation by CICIG and the public ministry, he chose
to destroy the rule of law in order to protect himself.”

During its 11 years operating in Guatemala, CICIG has
pressed corruption cases that have implicated more than 600 people, including
elected officials, businesspeople and bureaucrats. The commission said in
November that it has won 310 convictions and broken up 60 criminal networks.

Morales has made no secret of his contempt for the group —
formally, the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala — which
has investigated the president’s son and his brother, as well as Morales for
possible campaign finance violations. They deny the accusations.

Lawmakers so far have rebuffed proposals to lift Morales’
immunity from prosecution.

Morales said in August 2017 he was expelling CICIG’s chief.
Though a court quickly blocked that order, the commission head was later barred
from re-entering the country after leaving for a business trip.

Last year, Morales refused to renew CICIG’s mandate,
effectively giving it until September 2019 to wind down operations and leave
the country. He used his speech at this fall’s annual U.N. General Assembly
meeting of world leaders to inveigh against CICIG.

Most recently, a commission member was detained at an airport for almost a day and refused entry to the country after arriving Saturday. A court ordered his release.

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